Heinrichsdorf history 5

The primary historical sources that we have for Heinrichsdorf—the 1850 census and the 1858 church book—enable us to learn about this village not only at particular moments in time but also over the course of several decades, by comparing these particular moments with each other. Further, these source provide us the tools not only to discover the makeup of the community as a whole but also to trace the lives of the individual families who lived there.

The next posts in this series will touch on all these aspects of Heinrichsdorf’s history: the moment in  time and the historical trajectory of the broader community and its constituent families. We begin by looking into the data of the 1850 census, translated by Steve Fast (here).

1. Historical recap. As we learned earlier, Heinrichsdorf was not an existing village taken over by its Mennonite inhabitants but was rather a village newly founded by the group from Waldheim who had decided to return to Volhynia. They signaled their intent to return in 1845 and made the trip, it seems, in 1848, with the village being founded early in 1849 (see here). The 1850 census thus came only a year or, at most, two after the establishment of the village, which ensures that it provides an accurate picture of Heinrichsdorf in its earliest days.

2. Overview. Although the term village might evoke the image of a tiny hamlet, the census lists the names of 273 residents of Heinrichsdorf—a small town, to be sure, but more than a wide place in the road. These 273 residents were divided into thirty-one family groups, for an average of nearly nine people per family group. Many of the families no doubt lived in the same household under the same roof, but likely not all of them. We probably would not go wrong to imagine that Heinrichsdorf had perhaps thirty-five to forty households. One wonders if this village was organized like the villages in Molotschna and elsewhere, with houses arranged on both sides of a central road or street.

3. Demographics. Twenty family names are attested in the census, but six of them account for 192 out of the total 273 people.

• Funk: 37
• Schmidt: 33
• Unruh: 33
• Buller: 32
• Böse: 27
• Ratzlaff: 22

The other surnames in 1850 Heinrichsdorf were Teske (14), Voth (12), Nachtigal (10), Köhn (9), Schultz (8) Wedel (8), Janz (7), Pankratz (7), Ewert (5), Baltzer (2), Bayer (2), Franz (2), Klassen (2), Worbel (1). We have seen many of these surnames associated with each other in other historical documents. For example, the Przechowka church book includes sections for Wedel, Buller, Funck, Jantz, Köhn, Nachtigal, Pankratz, Ratzlaff, Schmidt, Unrau, and Voth. Similarly, the 1820 Rovno census included the names Buller, Nachtigal, Foth (= Voth), Beyer (= Bayer), Teske, Wedel, Köhn, Schmidt, and Pankratz. Obviously, these family groups had some sort of historical relation, or at least familiarity.

4. Demographics: gender. The 273 Heinrichsdorf residents included 144 males and 129 females, for a distribution of 52.7 percent males and 47.3 percent females.

5. Demographics: age. Given the large families that many Mennonites of that period had, one would expect a high percentage of children. Heinrichsdorf does not disappoint. What is particularly striking is how much of the population was so young. The table below shows the distribution for both genders and for the community as a whole.

ages	male total	male percent		female total	female percent		total	percent
0–17	81	56.3		64	49.6		145	53.1
18–35	30	20.8		36	27.9		66	24.2
36–60	23	16.0		20	15.5		43	15.8
61–	10	6.9		9	7.0		19	6.9
total	144		XX	129		XX	273

Clearly Heinrichsdorf was a young community by modern standards, with just over 77 percent of its population age thirty-five and younger. By comparison, the eighteen-and-under group accounted for 24 percent in the 2010 United States census. Whether this was young by nineteenth-century standards or in the Mennonite communities of that day remains to be seen.

If readers can think of any other questions they would ask of the data, please email me via the link at the top right of the blog. The next post will begin to compare the data from the census with that from the 1858 church book. We already know that some of the community left within Heinrichdorf’s first decade. We should be able to identify who left by comparing the census with the church book. What this will reveal is unknown, but the process of finding out should prove interesting and enjoyable.

There is Heinrichsdorf!

The community of Mennonite researchers, historians, and genealogists is remarkably helpful, always eager to share both resources and knowledge. Rod Ratzlaff is the latest to contribute to Buller Time’s quest to learn more about the world in which our family lived. An earlier post wondered about the location of Heinrichsdorf (see here) and offered two options that have been put forward.

Thanks to Rod, we can now confidently conclude that both options are wrong. Heinrichsdorf was not located northeast of Berdichev, as Schroeder–Huebert (1996) and Schrag (1959) claimed, nor was the village southwest of Berdichev, as the Society for German Genealogy in Eastern Europe Volhynian Gazetteer indicated. In fact, Heinrichsdorf was roughly 12 miles northwest of Berdichev. The Google Maps satellite view below shows the earlier mistaken placements of the village (the pins on the right) as well as the correct location (the point of the arrow).

The map below (all the following maps were provided by Rod) is from 1889, well after the time our family lived there. The black line going diagonally from the upper left to the lower right is a railroad track, but it was not laid until 1871–1876.

The closeup below gives a better view of the layout and size of Heinrichsdorf at that time. Note the abbreviation Kol., which stands for “kolony,” a designation we have seen before to indicate that the village was inhabited by colonists, immigrants (see here).

The next image is from a 1917 Russian map. The arrow points to the village itself, and the name of the village sits on top and to the right: Кол. Генрихсдорфъ (Kol. Genrikhsdorf).

The final map is a 1931 Polish one (perhaps actually mapped in the early 1920s). The village is much smaller by this time, and it disappears entirely from later maps.

If I have my bearings correct, the Google Maps satellite photo below shows the previous site of the village. Comparing the photo with the maps above, the bend in the track on the right side of the photo is the best clue for locating the village.

Although our family left Heinrichsdorf long before it vanished from the face of the earth, they did leave some of their own behind. At the least, Heinrich and Anna Buller’s daughter Maria (i.e., our ancestor David’s niece) and Peter and Maria’s son Heinrich (David’s nephew) presumably remain buried somewhere near the site of the former village. Although not part of our direct line, they are still part of our larger family and deserve to be remembered just the same.

Again, thank you to Rod Ratzlaff for teaching us about Heinrichsdorf via the maps and information that he provided. Now that we know where Heinrichsdorf is, maybe someday one of our clan will be fortunate enough to visit the site.

Works Cited

Schrag, Martin H. 1959. Volhynia (Ukraine). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available online here.

Schroeder, William, and Helmut T. Huebert. 1996. Mennonite Historical Atlas. 2nd ed. Winnipeg: Springfield.

Heinrichsdorf Bullers 2

We discovered in the previous post that the Heinrichsdorf church book does not record any events related to our family after 1861. The church book lists nearly 150 events during the years 1862–1874 in the pages preceding Benjamin Buller’s entries, but none for us. This led to a simple but seemingly inescapable conclusion: the last of our family members left Heinrichsdorf not too long after the last-recorded event. The GRANDMA database concurs.

We begin with the entry for Benjamin and Helena’s son Heinrich (i.e., David’s younger brother).

There are two things to note with the GRANDMA listing. (1) Heinrich and Anna Unruh Buller had a seventh child in 1861, a boy named Heinrich after his father. Heinrich Jr.’s older sister Eva is listed in the Heinrichsdorf church book, but he is not. (2) A note toward the bottom of the family entry states that Heinrich Sr. “was residing in Waldheim in 1862 per the Molotschna School Registers.” We will check that particular claim a little later, but for now it seems safe to conclude that Heinrich and Anna Unruh Buller and family left Heinrichsdorf sometime before the birth of their seventh child in 1861.

But what about Heinrich Sr.’s brother Peter, who is also entered into the Heinrichsdorf book? Peter and Maria Ratzlaff Buller had five children when we last saw them, and the birth of Benjamin on 31 January 1861 was the last Buller event recorded in the church book. However, GRANDMA knows of a sixth child, a son named Peter after his father, born on 20 March 1863. Peter Sr.’s GRANDMA entry immediately below shows Jr. at the bottom of the list.

When we look at Peter Jr.’s GRANDMA entry (below), we discover that it is reported that Peter Jr. was born in Waldheim, Molotschna colony. No source is provided for this information, but it is not hard to imagine this claim being true.

If the information gleaned from the Heinrichsdorf church book and GRANDMA is accurate, one can see a pattern repeated over the years. Benjamin and family made Heinrichsdorf their home in 1848, and the parents plus their three sons and their families were all listed on the 1850 census. However, by 1858 David and his family were gone, presumably back in Waldheim. A few years later brother Heinrich seems to have journeyed back to Waldheim as well, since his son born in 1861 is not listed in the church book. A year or two after that, brother Peter apparently followed David and Heinrich south to Waldheim, since his own youngest son was born in that Molotschna village in 1863.

Of course, we do not want to forget about the patriarch and matriarch of the family: Benjamin and Helena. Benjamin would have been seventy-two in 1861 and Helena anywhere between six to ten years younger. The fact that their deaths are not recorded in the Heinrichsdorf church book implies rather strongly that they returned to Waldheim with one of their sons, whether David in the 1850s or Heinrich or Peter in the early 1860s. We can never know, of course, but it seems most likely that our ancestors Benjamin and Helena died and were buried in Waldheim, perhaps in the same cemetery where their son (and our ancestor) David was laid to rest many years later.

Although the Heinrichsdorf segment of our family history seems to have come to an end, we are not yet done with Heinrichsdorf, nor are we done exploring new territory. Note in Peter Jr.’s entry above, for example, that he was married in a village named Kotlyarevka in Memrik colony. We should spend at least a little time acquainting ourselves with that, since it is part of our larger family story.

Heinrichsdorf Bullers 1

It is often productive to look at information from a variety of angles and perspectives, to ensure that we see all that it can teach us. Having examined our family’s Heinrichsdorf entries in detail, we now take a step back and look at the broader picture.

The table below includes all seventeen members of the Benjamin Buller family who are listed in the Heinrichsdorf church book. The order of names has been altered to make the relations easier to see: husbands and wives are listed together, and children are place in birth order, not separated by gender. Blank lines set apart the smaller family groupings: Benjamin–Helena, Heinrich–Anna and their daughters, and Peter–Maria and their children.

name	birth	baptism	marriage	death	relation
Benjamin Buller	??/??/1789	—	—	—	head of household
Helena ?? Buller	??/??/1799	—	—	—	wife of Benjamin
Heinrich Buller	09/11/1823	06/17/1842	04/06/1845	—	son of Benjamin
Anna Unruh Buller	02/07/1819	—	—	—	wife of Heinrich
Helena Buller	07/18/1846	—	—	—	daughter of Heinrich
Maria Buller	11/02/1848	—	—	01/07/1855	daughter of Heinrich
Susana Buller	04/07/1851	—	—	—	daughter of Heinrich
Elisabeth Buller	08/04/1853	—	—	—	daughter of Heinrich
Catharina Buller	03/11/1856	—	—	—	daughter of Heinrich
Eva Buller	10/30/1858	—	—	—	daughter of Heinrich
Peter Buller	09/23/1832	05/17/1851	—	—	son of Benjamin
Maria Ratzlaff Buller	02/06/1837	05/17/1851	—	—	wife of Peter
Anna Buller	01/23/1853	—	—	—	daughter of Peter
Helena Buller	03/22/1856	—	—	—	daughter of Peter
Heinrich Buller	10/24/1857	—	—	02/22/1859	son of Peter
Maria Buller	09/06/1859	—	—	—	daughter of Peter
Benjamin Buller	01/31/1861	—	—	—	son of Peter

Several things stand out in the listing.

1. Only three baptisms are recorded, one from before the family’s move to Heinrichsdorf and two after. Given his 1842 year of baptism, Heinrich Benjamin was baptized in Waldheim, when he was nineteen. Peter Benjamin and his wife Maria Ratzlaff were baptized the same day at Heinrichsdorf; Peter was nearly nineteen, while Maria had just celebrated her fourteenth birthday. The older adults no doubt were baptized long before they moved to Heinrichsdorf; one would expect the younger Bullers to be baptized beginning in 1865 or thereabouts (for Helena daughter of Heinrich and Anna).

2. Both Heinrich–Anna and Peter–Maria lost a child, which means that Benjamin–Helena lost two of their eleven grandchildren living in Heinrichsdorf. That is a fairly high percentage. Worth noting is that no other deaths are recorded, even for Benjamin, who was seventy-two when his last grandson recorded in the book was born.

3. This leads us to an important observation: no family event is recorded after the birth of Benjamin Peter Buller in 1861. Did whoever was in charge of the church book stop recording at that point? Or was this group of Bullers no longer at the church?

A quick check of the pages prior to Benjamin Buller’s puts to rest any thought that the church book stopped recording events after 1861. In fact, the fifty pages before Benjamin Buller is listed contain 142 events dated to the years 1862–1874, when the congregation moved to the United States. That is an average of nearly ten events for each year during that period.

Unless the Heinrichsdorf church simply stopped caring about the significant events in the lives of the Benjamin Bullers (unlikely), the only reasonable explanation is that the entire family left sometime after 1861. We know that our ancestors David and Helena left before 1858; it is highly likely that the rest of the family—David’s parents and his brothers Heinrich and Peter and their families—followed his lead, if not in his footsteps, and left Heinrichsdorf.

The GRANDMA database offers additional information that will clarify the picture for us, but that must wait for another post.

Benjamin Buller 26

One last post (for now) about the Benjamin Buller family in the Heinrichsdorf church book. The 1850 census introduced us to Benjamin and Helena’s fourth and apparently last son: Peter (see here). At that time Peter was seventeen, single, and living at home; by the time of the compilation of the church book in 1858, he warranted his own pages.

Three males are listed on the left-hand page: Peter and his two sons, Heinrich and Benjam[in]. Note first that Peter and family are still identified as family 22 (far left column), as a part of the Benjamin Buller larger family.

The record for Peter includes his date of birth (23 September 1832) and his date of baptism (17 May 1851). Based on his year of birth we know that he was born in Volhynia (precisely where is another matter), before the family made their first journey to Waldheim; in light of his baptism date, we can state with confidence that it took place in Heinrichsdorf (or the immediate area), after the Benjamin Buller family moved there from Waldheim.

Peter’s firstborn son, named Heinrich, had a short life: born on 24 October 1857, he died before the age of two, on 22 February 1859, at 9 in the morning (9 Uhr Morgens). Then came Benjamin, who was born 31 January 1861, at 5 AM (Uhr 5 Morgens).

On the right-hand page opposite are the females of the Peter Buller family, Peter’s wife and their three daughters.

Peter married Maria Ratzlaff, who was born 6 February 1837 and was baptized at age fourteen on 17 May 1851, the same day of Peter Buller’s baptism. The 1850 census seems to indicate that Maria was the youngest daughter of Benjamin and Helena Ratzlaff. (GRANDMA does not know that Maria was the daughter of 353925 and 353926.)

Peter and Maria’s first child was a daughter, Anna, who was born on 23 January 1855. Their second child was also a daughter, Helena, born 22 March 1856. After Heinrich was born the following year, a third daughter was born on 6 September 1859: Maria.

So much for the Heinrichsdorf records on the Peter Buller family. But that is not the end of the story. We will circle back to take a broader look at the church book and then follow that with additional information provided by the GRANDMA database. There remains more that we can say about our family’s residence at Heinrichsdorf.

Heinrichsdorf church book

This brief post seeks to tie up a few loose ends with the church book. We are by no means done with it, but it will be good to take care of these items.

First, thank you to Manuel Janz for clarifying some of the German words that earlier left me less than certain about the readings. We can now confirm the following.

1. The word that appeared to be what seemed an impossible Gegeboren is actually Ist geboren, that is, “was born.” The two words frequently appear run together (top photo, left) but are clearly separate in some examples (bottom photo). The first two photographs are from the Benjamin Buller page 60; the second set are from later in the church book.

Notice also that the i is capitalized in three of these examples but lowercased in the fourth (bottom photo, right). This last example is actually the easiest for a novice to read, since the dot above the i is a helpful clue.

2. Manuel also explains that the first word in each line below (before Frau) is dessen, translated in this context as “whose.” The first example is from the Helena Buller page 61; the second example is from later in the book.

The second example strikes me as easier to read, but the first is no doubt legible to those with more experience deciphering and reading different types of handwritten German.

3. What I thought might be the word im (= in dem, or “in the”) is rather den, “the.” Thus, the correct reading of Anna Unruh’s birth entry below is: “Ist geboren 1819 den 7te Februar,” which would be translated “Was born 1819, the 7th of February.”

4. Finally, Manuel confirms that the word before Anna Unruh the elder’s name is Wittwe, which is a variant spelling for Witwe, or “widow.” As we have seen on a number of occasions, spelling was not fully standardized during the nineteenth century.

Thank you to Manuel for those clarifications. We also owe sincere thanks to the Mennonite Library and Archives (see here) located at Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas, for posting photographs of the Heinrichsdorf church book for us to view. All Buller Time photographs of the church book are from the MLA (see here).

Benjamin Buller 25

The last post addressed an oddity with the Benjamin Buller section of the Heinrichsdorf church book: the presence of Anna Unruh the elder among a family of Bullers. We deduced from the evidence that Anna probably joined the Buller household (likely the Heinrich Buller one) because she was widowed and was now living with her daughter Anna Unruh Buller and family: Anna’s husband Heinrich and their daughters.

One final note about the widow Anna Unruh. Presumably she was listed where she was because she was the oldest female member of the household not married to Benjamin. That is, Helena Buller was listed first because she was married to the head of household Benjamin. Then followed Anna Unruh the elder because she was the next oldest female in the house. After Anna the mother was listed Anna the daughter, followed by daughter Anna’s six daughters.

With that loose end tied up, we are ready to turn to the entries for Heinrich and Anna’s daughters.

The daughters’ names and dates of birth are clear enough:

• Helena: 18 July 1846
• Maria: 2 November 1848
• Susana: 7 April 1851
• Elisabeth: 4 August 1853
• Cathrina: 11 March 1856
• Eva: 30 October 1858

A few details merit further comment.

1. For the first time in the Benjamin Buller entries we see an entry in the far right column, which is where dates of death are recorded. Heinrich and Anna’s second daugher Maria, who was born in late 1848, died at the age of six in early 1855, 7 January, to be exact. We read earlier in the Jacob D. Epp diary about the high incidence of child mortality (here); this entry is a reminder that many families of that time were familiar with this grim reality.

2. The youngest daughter, Eva, has not only her date of birth recorded but her time of birth as well: 5:00 AM (Morgend = morning). One wonders if that detail is recorded because it happened close in time to the compilation of the church book.

3. The information here is consistent with that recorded in the 1850 census (see here). Heinrich and Anna had only two daughters at that time: Helena and Maria.

4. According to the GRANDMA database, Heinrich and Anna had a seventh child after Eva, a son named Heinrich. It is worth noting that the entry does not list a source for this information, which is always cause for caution. If the entry is accurate (whatever its source), then the fact that this 1861 birth is not recorded in the Heinrichsdorf church book may imply something important: maybe Heinrich and Anna and family left Heinrichsdorf after Eva’s 1858 birth but before Heinrich Jr.’s 1861 birth. The GRANDMA entry for Heinrich Sr. says that he ended up back in Waldheim, but we need to check that out before we take any of this as more than a possibility.

That closes out the first two Benjamin Buller pages in the Heinrichsdorf church book, which covered Benjamin and Helena Buller, their son Heinrich and Anna Unruh Buller and their six daughters, and Anna Unruh Buller’s widowed mother Anna Unruh. The next post will turn to another of Heinrich and Anna’s sons: Peter.

Benjamin Buller 24

Having covered the first Benjamin Buller page in the Heinrichsdorf church book—collecting what information we could about Benjamin 2 and his son Heinrich, then discussing why David and family do not appear anywhere in the book—we are ready to examine the next page, which lists the female counterparts to Benjamin and Heinrich on the first one.

As explained earlier, information about male family members was recorded on a left-hand page; that for female family members appeared on the facing right-hand page. Husband and wife are roughly aligned across the pages, with children listed below parents: boys below their fathers and girls below their mothers. The composite scan below shows how the two pages were laid out side by side.

There is obviously a lot more writing on the female side of these Benjamin Buller pages, and it will require careful work to make sense of it all. It is easiest for us to begin at the bottom of the list and work our way up. The last name written in the name column (the wide one on the left) is Eva, and five additional names appear above hers; as we will see, all six names have the heading Töchter, or daughter. Above them is their mother, whose position across from Heinrich indicates that she is his wife, so the six girls are their daughters.

Above the line for Heinrich’s wife are two additional entries, and here is where it becomes terribly complicated.

We begin with the column headings. With no claim to having it correct, I read the heading of the first column as Weiblichen Nahmen, which one can translate as “female names.” The main problem with this reading is that the word for “names” typically has no h, being spelled Namen. However, because the content of the column supports this reading (the column records the names of the female family members), we will accept the reading until it is proven incorrect.

The other three columns are easier to read (especially when one knows what to expect in them). They record the dates of birth (Geboren), baptism (Getauft), and death (Gestorben). Before we move on, notice that the label Töchter is fairly clear in this extract. We see also that Heinrich’s first daughter was named Helena, just like Heinrich’s own mother.

All that is interesting, but we want to focus on the first three lines, since that is where we encounter some complications.

Line 1: The first word is not clear to me (additional time and effort—and expertise—are needed), but the second and third are obvious: Frau Helena. That is, this is the line for Benjamin’s wife Helena. We see in the next column that she was born (the word appears to be Gegeboren, but I do not think that can be correct) sometime in the year 1799.

This is the first complication. According to the Rovno register (here) and the 1850 Heinrichsdorf census (here), Helena was four to six years younger than her husband Benjamin. We know that he was born in 1789, so a birth year of 1799 for Helena seems mistaken.

Lines 2–3: We treat these entries together, since we really cannot understand either one in isolation. The first curiousity to notice is that the name on both lines is the same: Anna Unruh. The word at the beginning of line 2 is unclear at first glance; we may return to it later. The word at the beginning of line 3 is the same as at the beginning of line 1, so we will attempt to decipher both at some point. Obviously, the word before Anna Unruh in line 3 is Frau, which identifies this person as Heinrich’s wife (since he is across from this line on the left-hand page).

If line 3 identifies Anna Unruh as Heinrich’s wife, then who is the Anna Unruh in line 2? This is where the GRANDMA database becomes valuable. We see in the second column that Anna Unruh in line 3 was born on 7 February 1819 (written “1819 im [?] 7 Februar”). The Anna Unruh on line 2’s entry is not as clear with its date, but it seems reasonable to read her date of birth as 15 February 1785. (I find it interesting that the exact dates of birth are know for the two Unruhs but not for Benjamin or Helena Buller.)

A simple search of the GRANDMA database for an Anna Unruh born in 1819 returns an interesting result.

Anna Unruh 402143 was married to Heinrich Buller, so this is the right person. Notice her mother’s name: Anna Ratzlaff—who married Benjamin Unruh. Her married name was thus Anna Unruh. According to GRANDMA, Anna Ratzlaff Unruh was born 17 February 1784, which resembles in some respects our date of 15 February 1785. Unfortunately, GRANDMA does not record the source for its 1784 date of birth, so we cannot judge which one is more likely right.

Two additional pieces of information fill out the picture. First, according to GRANDMA, Benjamin Unruh died in 1833, which means that the person is line 2 is the widow Anna Unruh. It is tempting, in light of this information, to read the first word of line 2 as Witwe, or widow, but the spelling just does not seem right for that. The word remains undeciphered. Second, the 1850 census lists a Benjamin Unruh whose mother Anna lived with him and his family (family 9 on the census), an Anna Unruh whose age listed would place her date of birth in 1785.

How does this all fit together? Heinrich Buller was married to Anna Unruh Buller, daughter of Anna Ratzlaff Unruh. As a widow, Anna Ratzlaff Unruh lived with her children, first her son Benjamin and his family, then her daughter Anna Unruh Buller and her family. The fact that Anna Ratzlaff Unruh is listed with the Benjamin Buller larger family in the church book certainly implies that by 1858 she was living with them. For whatever reason, she no longer lived with her son Benjamin and his wife, nor did she live with her other son David and his wife or any of her other children and their families.

We may never know why Anna Ratzlaff Unruh chose to live with her daughter Anna and son-in-law Heinrich Buller. One thing we do learn from this mystery solved is that the compiler of the church book did not woodenly copy the material from the 1850 Russian census, even if it served as a source of information for him. Earlier Anna Ratzlaff Unruh had been listed with family 9; now she appears with family 22, which presumably was reflective of her current situation.

The next post will turn to Heinrich and Anna’s six daughters, after which we will cover yet another son of Benjamin and Helena. There is still a great deal of information to process and organize as we reconstruct our broader family story.

Benjamin Buller 23

The previous post introduced the Buller pages (yes, there are multiple pages) in the Heinrichsdorf church book. There we examined the entries for Benjamin Buller and his son Heinrich. We ended with a question about what we saw—or rather, what we did not see. The hint was the 1850 Russian census, and especially the fact that the church book seems to follow it rather rigorously, even to the point of including the families in the same order as the census and assigning them the same numbers found in the census.

If the church book follows the census, then someone is missing between Benjamin and Heinrich, the son who was older than Heinrich, who was the oldest son of Benjamin and Helena to emigrate back to Heinrichsdorf: our ancestor David. As the older of the two sons, he should have been listed immediately after Benjamin, just as he was in the 1850 census. The fact that he is not is significant. The fact that David and family appear nowhere in the Heinrichsdorf church book speaks volumes.

We know that David, Helena, and their three children Helena, Peter D, and Elisabeth all came to and lived in Heinrichsdorf; the 1845 list of Mennonites wishing to return to Volhynia and the 1850 census both prove that beyond reasonable doubt. Now we know that, at the time of the creation of the church book, they were no longer in Heinrichsdorf.

Two questions arise: When did David and family leave Heinrichsdorf? Where did they go? The second of the two questions is easiest to answer. We know that David spent the latter years of his life in Waldheim, Molotschna colony, so one may safely assume (until evidence indicating otherwise comes to light) that he and his family left Heinrichsdorf and retraced their steps southeast 400 miles to Waldheim, where they had lived for most of the 1840s. The three parallel lines in the lower half of the map below represent the three moves that David made. The red one in the center represents his 1839 trip as an unmarried man accompanying his father and mother and siblings from Volhynia to Waldheim; the blue one on the bottom represents now-married David’s 1848 move from Waldheim to the soon-to-be-founded village of Heinrichsdorf; the purple line on top indicates his final move back to Waldheim in Molotschna colony, made sometime after 1850. But when?

The date on the cover of the church book pictured at the top of the post is our only clue. On the last line of the title section of the cover one can see the year 1858. This is presumably the date that the book was started. As we noted earlier (here), one of the introductory pages records an event from September 1861, so obviously the book was added to for a number of years. (Inspection of the book will no doubt reveal the latest date of birth, baptism, marriage, or death recorded, which will give us a better sense of the “life” of the book.)

If 1858 was the year that someone began compiling the book, and if the process of creating the book began by recording all those people in the 1850 census who were still in Heinrichsdorf, then it would be reasonable to conclude that David and family left sometime between 1850 (the year of the census, on which they appear) and 1858 (the year of the church book, in which they do not appear). Anything more definitive than this is impossible for us to say at this point.

There is, however, one more question that we should ask, even though we have no hope of answering it at this time: Was Helena Zielke Buller alive when David and family moved back to Waldheim? Of course, we do not know with certainty when Helena died. The Buller Family Records lists only “1855?” This likely reflects the fact that David and Helena’s last son was born 14 February 1855. One wonders if Helena died as a result of complications or illness associated with that childbirth.

Even more intriguing is when Helena passed away in relation to the family’s location. Did she die while they lived in Heinrichsdorf? If so, then David moved back to Molotschna as a single parent with six children, three of them under the age of seven. This is possible, but a more reasonable (at least to us) option would have been to stay in Heinrichsdorf near his parents and several siblings who could perhaps assist him in caring for the children until he remarried.

If Helena passed away after the family’s final move, then we might imagine that David and family moved sometime between 1850 and 1854. It seems reasonable to expect that David and family did not return to Waldheim alone, that a group of Heinrichdorfers moved back at the same time. Maybe by comparing the 1850 census with the 1858 church book, we will be able to identify all those who went back to Waldheim, and perhaps by doing so we will be able to narrow down the time frame of our family’s final move to Waldheim. For now, all we can do is wonder is how Helena’s death fit into the larger framework of our family history.

Benjamin Buller 22

Now that we have learned all that we can about Heinrichsdorf the village, we are ready to circle back around and explore the congregation’s church book.

The front cover of the church book has the year 1858 written on it, which one would think is the year when the records were assembled, or at least the process of compiling the church book was begun. That being said, we should not ignore the fact that the brief church and village history at the front of the book records an event as late as 5 September 1861. Mention of that event does not require us to conclude that the book was not started until after that; however, it should warn us against thinking that the book was completed in one fell swoop in the year 1858.

Obviously, our primary interest in the book is for what it reveals about our own family. In fact, there are several pages devoted to our Bullers. We will examine them all as we piece together new details about our family into a fuller picture than we have had thus far.

Just as we saw in the 1850 Heinrichsdorf census, males are listed together on the left, females all together on the right. We begin with our family’s first left-hand page, with the male Bullers.

The thumbnail to the right provides a useful overview of the setup of each page, with columns clearly marked by headings at the top and lines down the page. We will look at the columns more closely in a moment; for now it is enough to note that the narrow one on the left contains numbers, followed by the widest column for the person’s name; after the name are four columns of equal width: one for the date of birth, one for the date of baptism, one for the date of marriage, and one for the date of death.

One obvious difference between this church book and the one from Przechowka (see, e.g., here) is the unused space on this one. The Przechowka church book did not use only the tops of pages; the entire page from top to bottom was filled with names and as many dates as were available. A less obvious difference between the two is the basic arrangement. The Przechowka book listed females and males all mixed together, generally in order of age or date of birth within the family. As already noted, this book is much more like the census form, with males on the left and females on the right. We should keep this in mind as we look at the entries in detail.

The extract above has the first two entries for our family. The numbers in the first column and the names in the second (or at least the top name) should be recognizable to all:

22. Benjamin Buller
22. Heinrich Buller

The first question that comes to mind is: Why number 22? The answer is simple: 22 is the family number, for lack of a better term, assigned to the Benjamin Buller family in the 1850 census. Of course, this raises an entirely different question: Why is the Heinrichsdorf church book using the Russian census numbers? It gives one the impression that the information collected during that census was used to fill in the church book—and that may in fact have been the case.

It seems reasonable that the village had a copy of the census in their possession and that they drew upon that copy while compiling the church book. This would also explain why they maintained the practice observed in the census of putting males on the left and females on the right. We know none of this for certain, but it seems a reasonable enough hypothesis.

Minimal information was recorded for Benjamin: his birth in the year 1789. Neither the day nor the month of birth nor anything about his baptism or marriage date is recorded; presumably it was not known to the person compiling this record. Since no date of death is entered, it is probably safe to conclude that Benjamin was still living in 1858.

Much more was known about Benjamin’s son Heinrich. He was born on 11 September 1823, was baptized on 17 June 1842, and was married (we will find out his wife’s name when we look at the next page) on 6 April 1845.

We should stop here and ask what we see—and especially what we do not see. It might help to look carefully at the 1850 census listing for the Benjamin Buller family. We will return to this point in the next post.

Heinrichsdorf history 4

We will return to Benjamin Buller and family soon (promise!), but first we should tie up some loose ends with the village that they called home: Heinrichsdorf. Thus far we have attempted to locate the village (here), surveyed one primary source on the village’s founding and early history (here), and examined a possible explanation for why the village founders left Waldheim in Molotschna colony (see here and here).

The goal of this post is modest: to determine how many of the Mennonites named on the 1845 list of those wishing to leave Waldheim and return to Volhynia appear on the Heinrichsdorf census taken in 1850. The simplest way to proceed will be to list all the people (not just heads of households) named on the 1845 list of Mennonites who planned to move from Waldheim back to Volhynia, then see how many of those names reappear on the 1850 census. We should also be on the lookout for names on the 1850 census that do not appear in the 1845 list.

We begin with the names on the 1845 list:

1. Cornelius Funk	18. Widow Vanke	35. Johann Voth
2. Peter Schmidt	19. Cornelius Funk	36. Andreas Schmidt
3. Cornelius Unruh	20. Benjamin Funk	37. Johann Schmidt
4. Benjamin Ratzlaff	21. Andreas Funk	38. Benjamin Buller Sr.
5. Jacob Buller	22. David Koehn	39. David Buller
6. Jacober Buller	23. Tobias Schultz	40. Heinrich Buller
7. Heinrich Buller	24. Samuel Boese	41. David Koehn
8. Peter Buller	25. Benjamin Janz	42. Cornelius Balzer
9. Heinrich Nachtigal	26. Johann Ewert	43. Widow Worbel
10. Cornelius Unruh	27. Heinrich Funk	44. Jacob Pankratz
11. Benjamin Unruh	28. Jacob Funk	45. Michael Teske
12. Heinrich Unruh	29. Cornelius Funk	46. Cornelius Teske
13. Widow Unruh	30. Heinrich Wedel Jr.	47. David Nachtigal
14. Katharina Unruh	31. Widow Maria Ratzlaff	48. Georg Bayer
15. Benjamin Unruh	32. Jacob Boese	49. Jacob Klassen
16. Widow Unruh	33. Benjamin Boese
17. David Unruh	34. Benjamin Ratzlaff

Comparing it to the 1850 census (here) reveals nothing surprising or remarkable. Almost all of these people appear on the census, which indicates that most people followed through with their plans to relocate in Volhynia. Only Widow Vanke (no. 18), Heinrich Wedel Jr. (no. 30; but see below), and Johann Voth (no. 35) are not listed on the 1850 census.

One oddity is that the names appear in the same exact order in the 1850 Heinrichsdorf census as in the earlier 1845 Molotschna list. How was this engineered, when the lists were compiled five years apart and in locations separated by hundreds of miles? One might attribute it to Russian government efficiency (i.e., some office clerk recopied the 1850 list to match the order of the 1845 one), were it not for the fact that the 1850 census is apparently an original copy created on location, since it bears the signatures of the Heinrichsdorf community leaders. Another possibility is that the census takers worked from a earlier document (e.g., the 1845 list) instead of beginning with a blank piece of paper. Another question that we may never adequately answer.

At any rate, the census does provide additional information for several people listed.

1. Jacober Buller (no. 6) is identified in the census as Jacob Gregor Buller. How he is related to our family is as yet unknown.

2. The census notes that the father of Cornelius Funk (no. 19) died in 1846, thus presumably after the 1845 list but before the group left Waldheim. Why his name is not on the 1845 list is unknown. That his name appears with his sons and their families on the Heinrichsdorf census, even though he never made it to Heinrichsdorf, reminds us not to read too much into how we think these records should be arranged.

3. Tobias Schultz (no. 23) seems to correspond to Tobias Schmidt in the 1850 census; both appear in the same place in the list. However, the census is also signed by Tobias Schulz, so the relation of all these names remains unclear.

4. According to the 1850 census, the widow Maria Ratzlaff (no. 31) had a son named Johann, which enables us to identify her deceased husband: Heinrich.

5. Johann Schmidt (no. 37) is listed as Jacob Schmidt in the census. Apparently the two names were somewhat interchangeable.

6. Widow Worbel’s name is missing in the 1845 list, but the census reports that her name is Anna, that her husband died in 1844 (back in Molotschna), and that his name was Johann.

7. The 1850 census includes one family that is not found on the 1845 list, that of Johann Schmidt. He appears at the very end (thus perhaps confirming the suggestion above that the census taker worked from an earlier document that had all the other names in order). Schmidt does appear in a later part of the 1845 list; it is not clear why he was not listed with the other thirty-three families.

None of this is earth-shattering, but there is one important piece of information contained in the 1850 census: the Heinrichsdorf teacher Johann Ratzlaff and deacon Benjamin Unruh had not yet returned to Waldheim at that time. Benjamin Unruh (no. 11) was living in Heinrichsdorf with his wife Helena and their three children. The name Johann Ratzlaff does not appear on the 1845 list because he was counted as part of his widowed mother’s household.

In fact, almost everyone who involved with the establishment of Heinrichsdorf still resided there in 1850. When we dig into the Heinrichsdorf church book in the next post, that picture will change in a dramatic way.

Heinrichsdorf history 3

The claim is made in detail by John A. Boese and in summary form by Martin H. Schrag that certain Waldheim residents left that Molotschna village within a few years of arriving there for economic and religious reasons. The specifics of the claim, that Waldheim’s wealthy prohibited those who left from owning land, is easily checked, since we have both a list of Waldheim’s first forty landowners and a list of those who stated their intent to leave.

Comparing the two lists is messy in places, since some we find two Cornelius Unruhs, two Benjamin Unruhs, and two Jacob Bullers, and it is not always clear which one appears on one list or another. In addition, a few male heads of household listed among the landowners had apparently died, so all that appears on the 1845 list of returnees is the entry widow X, which leaves the identify of the deceased husband not entirely certain. In spite of this messiness, we can draw reasonable conclusions about the landed status of the Mennonites who left Waldheim and founded Heinrichsdorf.

1. The 1845 list (see here) contains the names of nearly fifty individuals who had declared their intent to leave Waldheim for Volhynia but arranges those persons into thirty-three families, each of which is identified by a head of household. It is these head of household names that interest us:

Cornelius Funk	Tobias Schultz	Andreas Schmidt
Cornelius? Unruh	Andreas Koehn*	Benjamin Buller the elder
Benjamin Ratzlaff	Samuel Boese	David Koehn
Jacob Buller	Benjamin (Peter?) Janz	Cornelius Balzer
Jacober Buller	Johann Ewert	Johann Worbel
Peter Buller	Heinrich Funk*	Jacob Pankratz
Heinrich Nachtigal	Heinrich Wedel the elder*	Friedrich Kunkel*
Cornelius Unruh	Widow Maria Ratzlaff	Michael Teske
Benjamin Unruh	Jacob Boese	David Nachtigal
Cornelius? Funk	Benjamin Ratzlaff	Widow Wilhelmina Bayer•
David Koehn	Johann Voth	Jacob Klassen

The four names marked with an * (Andreas Koehn, Heinrich Wedel, Friedrich Kunkel) are said to have remained in Waldheim, so they should be excluded from consideration, even though their names appear on the 1845 list. We are told later that Widow Wilhelmina Bayer (marked with a •) did not go to Volhynia, even though her son Georg did. This leaves us with twenty-eight names. If only a few of them were landowners in Waldheim, then Boese and Schrag’s claim gains plausibility; if a large number of them were landowners, that claim must be called into question.

2. The following table highlights in red those who were landowners:

Cornelius Funk	Tobias Schultz	Andreas Schmidt
Cornelius? Unruh		Benjamin Buller the elder
Benjamin Ratzlaff	Samuel Boese	David Koehn
Jacob Buller	Benjamin (Peter?) Janz	Cornelius Balzer
Jacober Buller	Johann Ewert	Johann Worbel
Peter Buller		Jacob Pankratz
Heinrich Nachtigal
Cornelius Unruh	Widow Maria Ratzlaff	Michael Teske
Benjamin Unruh	Jacob Boese	David Nachtigal
Cornelius? Funk	Benjamin Ratzlaff
David Koehn	Johann Voth	Jacob Klassen

Seventeen of the twenty-eight, or 61 percent, were Waldheim landowners. This makes it difficult to believe that economics was the primary motivation for this group’s decision to leave Waldheim.

3. An additional observation weakens Boese’s argument further. Boese seems to distinguish between the landowners who were already established in Waldheim and this “new group” whom the landowners sought “to keep … as a laboring class.” In fact, three of Waldheim’s original eight settlers (Michael Teske, Johann Worbel, Benjamin Ratzlaff) were among the returnees, and a fourth original settler (Friedrich Kunkel) initially declared his intent to leave but later reversed course and decided to stay. These facts are at odds with a simple division of the community into wealthy oldtimers and oppressed newcomers.

4. Although Boese’s account does not seem accurate for the group as a whole, it presumably describes the experience and perspective of some of the returnees—including his own ancestors. Interestingly, the 1845 list includes an entry for Jacob Boese as a head of household along with his brother Benjamin. The latter was John Boese’s grandfather, according to the GRANDMA database, which notes also that Benjamin was a wagon-maker who put in bids with the Russian government (see GM 280027; John A. Boese [70894] was the son of Abraham [280035]). As is evident in the table above, Jacob Boese was not a landowner, and neither was his brother Benjamin; they were rather laborers whose economic situation was less secure than that of landowners.

In the end, although Boese’s account and Schrag’s general statement may be true with regard to some of the returnees, land ownership probably does not explain why the majority of this group decided to return to Volhynia. Perhaps the motivation was more religious than economic, or maybe the economic aspect was not related to access to land but rather disappointing crops.

This latter possibility deserves further consideration, especially since the late 1840s were a time of crisis across Europe, with potato blight and poor harvests sometimes producing localized famine. It is too soon to know whether these sorts of factors played any role in this group’s decision to leave, but we should at least explore the possibility.

Works Cited

Boese, John A. 1967. The Prussian-Polish Mennonites Settling in South Dakota 1874 and Soon After. Freeman, SD: Pine Hill Press. Available online here.

Schrag, Martin H. 1959. Volhynia (Ukraine). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available online here.

Heinrichsdorf history 2

The church book account of Heinrichdorf’s founding and early years was relatively clear: the group who settled the village asked to leave Waldheim for a new home in 1845, and by early 1849 the new village had been founded; two teachers and a deacon were appointed shortly thereafter, but sometime before 1859 one teacher and the deacon returned to Waldheim, which led to the appointment and confirmation of two new teachers in 1861.

Because this account was written relatively close in time to the events that it reports, and because it was written by someone on the scene, we should treat it as generally reliable and use it to evaluate later or more distant narratives about Heinrichsdorf.

With that as background, we return to the story told by John A. Boese, whose work we consulted in attempting to discover Heinrichsdorf’s location (here). Boese actually has quite a bit to say about this obscure Volhynian village, since some of his ancestors lived there during its short existence. Boese’s account begins by observing that the some residents in Waldheim “found considerable disagreements in the church there and also in the village management.” Boese continues:

It appeared that the more well-to-do element of the village or colony desired to keep this new group, because they were poor, as a laboring class. So they would not allow them to own land. Village and church management appeared to dictate that the children of this new group should be placed in homes to serve as help. Our group was not accustomed to such idea and wanted to keep their own children in their own homes. All concerned could came to no agreement.

While Elder Peter H. Schmidt was the leader at Zabara-Waldheim, and appeared to have had good training and was a very able speaker,  the residing ministers did not seem to want to tolerate him and with all this resistance he decided to resign. He and his wife joined the group that went back to Volhynia in 1848 and his wife was the first one to be buried on the new cemetery plot in Heinrichsdorf.

This group that planned to return to Volhynia had elected Benj. P. Schmidt, (a son of Peter H.), as minister. They now applied for permission by authorities to migrate back to Volhynia. This was granted and so they returned in 1848 to an area that they had passed thru on the way to the Molotschna. This was a wooded area with the possibility of clearing enough ground for cultivation and pasture. The soil here was quite promising and the area was near good markets for their products.

Here the village of Heinrichsdorf was established. Since they had no Elder they joined the church activities of the Ostrog area where Benjamin Dirks was Elder. Later Tobias A. Unruh was Elder there and he also served this group. These church servants were still active when this group left for America.

Judging by the experience that this group had at the Molotschna, one would probably not just want to claim that “politics” had entered into the management of affairs there, but it appeared that those belonging to the more well-to-do class possessed the ruling element.

As indicated when this group settled near Zhitomir in Russia in 1848 Rev. Benjamin P. Schmidt was their leader. He was in charge of the group when they landed in South Dakota. … In 1849 when they were settled at Zhitomir in Volhynia, they elected Benjamin Unruh and John Ratzlaff as deacons but both soon left Heinrichsdorf. Then in 1859 Tobias H. Retzlaff and David Unruh were elected as ministers.

Several elements of Boese’s account deserve closer attention.

1. We begin with specific claims that we can check. Boese states that Benjamin P. Schmidt was elected minister. The Heinrichsdorf church book reports that Benjamin Schmidt was a teacher and that the minister was Benjamin Dirks (see here). Interestingly, Boese says that Schmidt was appointed while the group was still in Waldheim, a possibility that we suggested earlier. It seems, at first glance, that Boese has some facts correct and some incorrect.

Tobias A. Unruh (1819–1875)

2. Boese also identifies Benjamin Dirks as the elder of the Ostrog-area church (i.e., Karolswalde and other Mennonite villages around Ostrog). The church book indicates that Dirks “was endorsed as the minister by the [unnamed] reverend church elder.” In this case, Boese is apparently correct, since Ernst Crous (1959) reports that Benjamin Dircks was elder of the Ostrog-area churches beginning in 1817, followed in 1853 by Tobias A. Unruh, whom both Boese and the church book correctly identify. One wonders if the church book is mistaken about Benjamin Dirks or if there was a second person by the same name who served as minister in Heinrichsdorf. All we know for certain is that Boese does have his facts right in this case; the church book may as well.

3. Boese states that Benjamin Unruh and John Ratzlaff were elected deacons; according to the church book Unruh was indeed a deacon, but Ratzlaff was a teacher.

4. Finally, Boese reports that in 1859 Tobias H. Retzlaff and David Unruh were elected ministers. As we read in the church book, these two were elected teachers in 1860 and confirmed in 1861. While Boese has the names correct, his date is slightly off. Importantly, this particular report also hints that Boese’s term minister is what the church book refers to as a teacher, which should lead us to accept that perhaps his statement about Benjamin Schmidt (number 1) is correct after all.

Presumably Boese is reporting all that he was told about Heinrichsdorf from his ancestors who lived there. Recall that, although Boese wrote this account in 1967, he was already involved with matters of Mennonite history in 1930, when some of the Heinrichsdorf residents were still living in his South Dakota community.

At worst, the oral history that Boese passes on to his readers has the basic parts of the story correct—the when, where, and who questions—even if some of the details are not entirely accurate. This is important to keep in mind as we consider what Boese writes about why the people left Waldheim in the first place.

According to Boese, the Heinrichsdorf group left Waldheim due to economic oppression and religious disagreement. His specific charges are several and need to be read carefully:

the more well-to-do element of the village or colony desired to keep this new group … as a laboring class. So they would not allow them to own land.

Village and church management appeared to dictate that the children of this new group should be placed in homes to serve as help.

While Elder Peter H. Schmidt … appeared to have had good training and was a very able speaker,  the residing ministers did not seem to want to tolerate him and with all this resistance he decided to resign.

In other words, according to Boese, those who left for Heinrichsdorf were not allowed to own land and were kept in the position of laborers; the village and church leaders dictated that their children should be placed in homes as servants; and this group’s religious leader, Elder Peter H. Schmidt, was resisted to point that he resigned in frustration.

The same explanation is promoted by Martin Schrag: “Not all were satisfied with their new home, Waldheim, in the Molotschna settlement. Religious and economic misunderstandings arose between the older settlers and the newcomers (Schrag 1959, emphasis added). Does this settle the matter, or is Schrag merely repeating the same story told by Boese? Schrag does list in his Volhynia bibliography another book by Boese, which raises the possibility the two telling the same story.

Fortunately, it is possible to check one element of Boese’s reconstruction of events: his claim that the group who left Waldheim were not allowed to own land. We know for a fact that was not true for at least one of the returnees: Benjamin Buller 2. But perhaps Benjamin Buller was an anomaly and the other returnees did not own land in Waldheim.

There is a simple way to check this claim, by comparing the list of returnees on the 1845 list of those who had declared their intent to return with the comprehensive list of Waldheim landowners from the years 1838–1841. That will be the task of the next post in the Heinrichsdorf history series.


Works Cited

Boese, John A. 1967. The Prussian-Polish Mennonites Settling in South Dakota 1874 and Soon After. Freeman, SD: Pine Hill Press. Available online here.

Crous, Ernst. 1957. Karolswalde (Rivne Oblast, Ukraine). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available online here.

Schrag, Martin H. 1959. Volhynia (Ukraine). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available online here.

Heinrichsdorf history 1

Heinrichsdorf did not have a long history, roughly a quarter century all told, so not only do we not know with certainty where this Volhynian village was located, but we cannot say a great deal about its history either. Our primary source of knowledge about the village is a brief narrative of the village’s founding and early years found in the Heinrichsdorf church book, which survived and was carried to North America when the entire congregation emigrated in 1874.

Thanks to the Mennonite Library and Archives at Bethel College in Kansas, we have access to the pages of that church book here. On two introductory pages is the brief narrative mentioned above. It is written in German, but the MLA has also provided a translation, which is reproduced below:

Birth Registration

or

Book of Revisions for the Mennonite Church in Heinrichsdorf. Permission was granted to them by the board of the Molotchna Mennonite District in 1845 to look for a place or residence. In 1846 under the Proprietor Arilnitzky they were granted a plan for leasing land for the purpose of founding the above mentioned colony. In 1848 they received permission from the welfare committee of the state council. Boron and Rohen received the preferred plan from Arilnitzky and drew up the final plans for resettling in 1848. In the following year, 1849, their colony was founded and formed. Two teachers and one deacon were appointed for the founding of the colony and the community. The teachers were Benjamin Schmidt and Johann Ratzlaff, and the deacon was Benjamin Unrau. On the following March 23, 1849, Benjamin Dirks was endorsed as the minister by the reverend church elder. It was recommended to the congregation they follow the teachings of the Apostle Paul and be as one in the herd following Christ. However, since the above mentioned teacher Johann Ratzlaff and Deacon Benjamin Unrau left their assigned church and returned to the Molotchna Colony Waldheim, the church was weak on teachers. In 1859 they were advised to elect two teachers. On October 23, 1860, Tobias Ratzlaff and David Unruh were called and on the following September 5 the reverend church elder Tobias Unruh confirmed their place in Karolswalde. The congregation was commissioned to care for them and to look after them. They were to lead the congregation in the path of Jesus Christ and teach them according to the teachings of the holy apostles and then the Lord would add his help by adding his blessing to the work for which they are called, in love and respect, Amen.

The first page of the historical account.

Several points are worth noting.

1. The permission granted in 1845 to look for a new home is no doubt associated with the list of Mennonites who decided to leave Waldheim and return to Volhynia (here and here). Presumably the list was needed for the planners to know how much area was needed.

2. The church book provides helpful background on what was involved in the process of moving. Although many of the details are lost to us (e.g., a Google search for the name Arilnitzky returns no results), we can form an idea of the process: the group first had to request and receive permission to look for a new residence; once that place was located, they had to present for approval a plan to secure the land for the village; that approval would come from both a local or semilocal official and regional officials. Only after all these bureaucratic hurdles had been cleared could the group actually found its new community.

3. The founding of Heinrichsdorf is typically dated to 1848, but a straightforward reading of the the church book indicates that Heinrichsdorf was founded in early 1849. It is possible that the church book has the year incorrect (we saw that with a number of details in the Waldheim Gemeindeberichte). On the other hand, one might read statements such as Martin Schrag’s—“The dissatisfied members secured permission from the Russian gov­ernment to return to Volhynia, and … in 1848 they trekked back to Volhynia and founded the village of Heinrichsdorf”—to mean that the trip back was in 1848, even though the village founding did not take place until the following year.

4. Two teachers and one deacon were appointed for the group, but when? Given the fact that the minister’s appointment is dated precisely (23 March 1849) and after the founding of the community, one might guess that the other three were appointed earlier, perhaps much earlier, maybe even when they were still in Waldheim.

5. What is more interesting is the report that the teacher Johann Ratzlaff and the deacon Benjamin Unrau returned to Waldheim in Molotschna colony at some point before 1859, when the congregation was advised to select two new teachers. Elder Tobias Unruh confirmed Tobias Ratzlaff and David Unruh in this role on 5 September 1861. The service was conducted in the village of Karolswalde, a Mennonite village some 70 miles to the northwest (near Ostrog; see the map here). Tobias Unruh was recognized as elder by a number of Mennonite churches in this area (see Unruh and Thiessen 2007).

This short account contains a good portion of what we know for certain about Heinrichsdorf through at least 1861 (the date of the confirmation service). This is not, however, all that can be said. The following post will examine another narrative about Heinrichsdorf, one that seeks to explain why some residents of Waldheim left for Heinrichsdorf in the first place. After that we will return to the church book once again to learn what we can about Johann Ratzlaff and Benjamin Unrau (and others) leaving Heinrichsdorf and returning to Waldheim yet again. Rest assured, we will talk about Bullers at the end of this little detour—and what we learn should prove to be quite interesting.


Work Cited

Unruh, Abe J, and Richard D. Thiessen. Unruh, Tobias A. (1819–1875). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available online here.